Tuesday, September 11, 2007

In an effort to keep prisons from becoming recruiting havens for fundamentalist terrorists, the Bureau of Prisons is having its chaplains remove all the religious texts that might promote violence against non-believers and other-believers.

Not a bad start.

Because if there is one thing we should never tolerate it is crusading Jews and Christians killing innocents through the urgings of Charles Spurgeon and Thomas Aquinas. Unfortunately, in order to keep things fair, books by fundamentalist Islamic peace lovers are also casualties of the purge.

From the New York Times:

Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.

The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.

[...]

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

Like apologetic security guards who toss away their own pistols during a standoff with knife wielding thieves, the American system is becoming aggressively unconcerned with policies that might actually help to preserve our way of life in exchange for desire to level the playing field between what is American and a more worldly viewpoint.

Call it relativism if you will. It could just as accurately be called cultural suicide.